Free access vs subscription
Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed (is a free access portal to the US government’s Medline database.
Most other useful databases are not free
Coverage of relevant journals
Pubmed/Medline provides good, but by no means complete, coverage of Western journals. As Pumed is a given, by virtue of its free access, the pertinent question for other databases is what extra do they offer?
- AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine Database) http://www.ovid.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_AMED-Allied-and-Complementary-Medicine_13051_-1_9013052_Prod-12?cmpid=Home:PromotionsROTM-AMED is often available in the package of e-resources for students and staff on UK acupuncture degree course, but it provides rather little extra on top of Pubmed
- Scopus http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/scopus is the largest medical database but again there is a big overlap with Pubmed
- EMBASE http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/promo-page/embase/pbt_em_adwordsgeneric_jan2014/home/_nocache is perhaps the best add-on to Pubmed but it is very expensive and hence subscribed to by very few UK universities
- AltHealthwatch http://www.ebscohost.com/academic/alt-healthwatch focuses on CAM journals rather than medicine in general
- Zetoc http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ is freely available to UK universities. Primarily a catalogue of article references, it does include many abstracts too. Coverage is not quite as good as Pubmed, and the search facilities are inferior, but it does give direct access to your university’s full text interface.
Access to full texts
- No access: Pubmed, AMED, EMBASE, Scopus
- Some access: CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health) www.cinahl.com , various versions of MEDLINE, AltHealthwatch
Specialised databases
- AltHealthwatch: CAM journals (see above); though many of these are also indexed in general medical databases
- AcuTrials www.acutrials.ocom.edu : specialized in acupuncture but (currently) covers only randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews. No full text access but is does provide items of information over and above the usual key terms, to help characterize the nature of each trial from acupuncture and research perspectives
- Electroacupuncture. http://www.electroacupunctureknowledge.com/mayor_database/home.htm A database to accompany the book of the same name (ed David Mayor). More EA research than available anywhere else (and some non-electro entries too), but only up to the year 2000
Publisher databases
These are focused on, but not restricted to, the titles of a particular publisher or group, and generally more useful for accessing full texts than searching for lists of references. Science Direct (Elsevier) www.sciencedirect.com is the most well known; most institutions provide access to it. It includes about 2,500 journals and aims to cover the core scientific literature.
Citation indexes
One way of expanding your initial trawl is to follow up the references listed in the articles that you have already obtained. Citation indexes carry out a similar function but the other way round. All articles listed after searching on a particular topic will state the number of subsequent articles that have cited it: their details can then be displayed. Thus you can work forward from a particular key paper to find others in the field that have cited it. The Science Citation index http://thomsonreuters.com/science-citation-index-expanded/ is freely available only through a subscribing institution.
e-journal gateways and database hosts
Many institutions use an e-journal service to give you access to titles across hundreds of different publishers. EBSCO http://www.ebsco.com is a well known example. As with Science Direct, the details of what full text access you have are dictated by the purchasing decisions of your individual institution. That is true also of the Web of Science http://thomsonreuters.com/thomson-reuters-web-of-science/ , a platform that gives you access to several databases for tracking down multi-disciplinary research.
Directories of resources
There are countless such directories, covering everything from one particular therapy, such as acupuncture, to the whole of medicine or science. It's easy to browse through to the area you're interested in and many have a search facility. Compared with general internet search engines they will greatly reduce the number of sites you have to sift through, hopefully restricting it to the more pertinent ones (however no one directory can cover every site that may be useful).
Some universities and government bodies maintain CAM resource directories (and these would be expected to make an attempt to control the quality of their lists), for example:
University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Medicine: http://www.compmed.umm.edu/resources.asp
Many others provide resources for medicine/healthcare in general, for example:
University of Exeter: http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/subjectguides/medicine/usingtheinternet/internetresourcesformedicine/
Access to Chinese research
China/Asia On Demand (CAOD) is a gateway to research materials from China in particular and Asia in general. It provides a search facility but this has limited capabilities unless you can work in Chinese, and it does not display the abstract. Full text documents can be accessed by pay per-view ($11.95 is the basic fee per article, September 2013) or with a flat fee subscription. A sub-section covers the main TCM titles (123 of them as at April 2013): http://caod.oriprobe.com/packages/TCM.htm. They all have titles in English as well as Chinese but only some also have English keywords and abstracts.